Lectures on Don Quixote

**One of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists offers his take on the Spanish classic.**

The author of* Lolita* and *Pale Fire* was not only a master of fiction but a distinguished literary critic as well. In this collection of lectures, which he delivered at Harvard in the early 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov shares insights based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the seventeenth-century novel by Miguel de Cervantes, a timeless classic and one of the most deeply influential works in all of Western literature.

Rejecting the common interpretation of *Don Quixote* as a warm satire, Nabokov perceives the work as a catalog of cruelty through which the gaunt knight passes. Edited and with a preface by Fredson Bowers, this volume offers “a powerful, critical, and dramatic elaboration of the theme of illusion” (V. S. Pritchett, *The New York Review of Books*).